Hostinger Review 2018: Pros & Cons + Our Real Test Data

Considering
using Hostinger for your next website? Hostinger is a hosting service
that’s made waves for its low prices and easy-to-use dashboard. But is it right for you?

In our Hostinger review, we aim to find out by giving you a hands-on look at Hostinger’s performance, dashboard, and other features.

In
general, we found Hostinger to offer great value when it comes to price
vs performance. Additionally, you get some other helpful features like a
custom hosting dashboard and simple software autoinstallers.

We’ll
discuss a couple negatives, as well. But overall, we think the pros
outweigh the cons when it comes to Hostinger, especially for casual
webmasters with limited budgets.

1. Hostinger Speed & Performance Test: Faster Than We Thought

Hostinger’s prices are low. And when you see low prices, it’s easy to think low-quality, right? That’s just how human psychology works…

But
despite Hostinger’s rock-bottom prices, we were actually pleasantly
surprised by Hostinger’s performance when we ran our test site through
some performance tests. It’s certainly not the fastest host we’ve ever
tested, but for the price, it should perform well enough for most webmasters.

As
with all our hosting reviews, we loaded up our test site with an
Elementor page builder template to simulate a real site and make it
possible to equally compare page load times across multiple tests.

Here’s how Hostinger did…

First, in our Pingdom test it loaded in 2.09 seconds from the San Jose, California test server:

Then, we put it through GTmetrix, where it clocked in at 2.6 seconds from the Vancouver, Canada test server:

Finally,
to see whether Hostinger can maintain those page load times under
periods of high-traffic, we ran it through a Load Impact test with 50
active visitors:

Despite a spike at the beginning, load times (green line) were generally rock-steady as the number of visitors (blue line) increased.

There’s a good reason Hostinger is still able to deliver solid page load times…

Despite the low prices, Hostinger is still using all the latest tech. That is, you get features like:

PHP 7

NGINX caching

GZIP Compression

HTTP/2

And all those features help explain why Hostinger is able to still offer quick page load times.

2. Uptime

Getting cheap hosting does not mean you will have a slow and slow performing website, especially with Hostinger. While it’s true that Hostinger has the cheapest hosting plans out there their performance is still top-notch. The only small downside is Hostinger’s uptime which can go below 99% despite having an uptime guarantee. For the testing we did, Hostinger did fairly well accumulating only 7 hours of downtime for a 3 months period of time. The best month had an uptime of 99.92% – not bad at all.

3. Support

24/7 Live chat support via Intercom and good response times.

If
you ever need help, Hostinger offers 24/7 live chat support that you
can access from your hosting dashboard. They use Intercom for support, which is awesome. If you’re not familiar, Intercom is a great method for live chat because:

It’s not a separate window – you can access it without leaving the regular dashboard.

You can click around to other dashboard pages without accidentally closing your chat.

It’s easy to access past chat logs at any time.

In our test, we were able to connect to a live agent in well under a minute. In fact, it was more like 15 seconds. For reference, we started our chat at 11:15 pm EST.

There’s
also an option to pay an extra $7.99 for priority support. But given
how fast we got a response with regular support, we’d recommend leaving
this off to start.

Exclusive Hostinger Coupon for 2018

Benefit from Hostinger’s incredible discount that will save you up to 80% each month. This offer is available only on our website and is limited. Time is ticking – get yours now!

4. Price

Rock-bottom prices and a free domain name.

Hostinger just flat-out has some of the lowest hosting prices in the industry.
That wouldn’t be as big of a draw if the rest of Hostinger were
low-quality, but given that you still get that great custom dashboard,
along with solid performance, price is one of the biggest benefits to using Hostinger.

Hostinger’s
cheapest plan clocks in as low as $2.15 per month when you pay for a
big chunk up front. Or, even if you only pay for 3 months, you’ll still
pay just $3.99 per month. For that small of a commitment, you’ll struggle to find anyone cheaper.

Here is the promotional (first billing) starting price for each Hostinger plan:

Single Shared Hosting – $0.80 per month for one website. Yes, you read that right. Only $0.80 per month. This is by far the cheapest hosting plan you will find. You might
believe that for this amount you will get nothing, but you would be
wrong. This plan includes 1 email account, 100 GB bandwidth, 1X
processing power and memory, intuitive website builder, robust c-panel,
and easy to use access manager.

Premium Shared Hosting –
is only $0.88 per month and contains unlimited websites along with
unlimited SSD disk space and unlimited bandwidth. Other features it has
include an website builder, 2X WordPress optimized speed, and free
domain name – this comes with an annual plan.

Business Shared Hosting – comes in at $1.44 per month. Apart from including the same features
as the first two plans, this one also includes daily back-ups, deluxe
live support, 2X processing power & memory, and free SSL.

The table below will showcase how much you can save in 3 years using the discount coupon.

Hostinger Shared Hosting

Without Discount

With Discount

Savings in 3 years

Single Shared Hosting

$3.99/month

$0.80/month

$114.84

Premium Shared Hosting

$8.84/month

$0.88/month

$286.56

Business Shared Hosting

$11.99/month

$1.44/month

$379.8

While that first-tier plan is cheap, we actually recommend you go up a tier if possible because the Premium Shared Hosting plan offers a ton of upgrades. Starting at just $3.49 per month, it gives you:

Multiple websites

Unlimited bandwidth

A free domain name

Weekly backups

Plus – all plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if you’re not happy, you’re not risking anything.

This
isn’t a huge con because Hostinger actually does better than much of
its competition when it comes to billing cycles, but you can’t pay for a
single month with Hostinger.

The shortest option is 3-months.
Again, most cheap shared hosts require a year minimum, but if you’re
specifically interested in pay monthly WordPress hosting, you might be
better off with something like A2 Hosting.

5. Actual Hosting Limits

Hostinger
has 3 shared hosting plans you can choose from depending on your needs.
For a single website it is recommended to opt for the Single Shared
Hosting plan even if it’s a bit limiting. The other two plans have more
features and perform better overall.

As with most hosting
companies, each plans is different and has its own limitations. To make
it clearer for those interested we have a table below that explain what
features are available for each plan.

Below is a table showcasing Hostinger’s plans and their limitations.

Features

Single Shared Hosting

Premium Shared Hosting

Business Shared Hosting

Storage

10 GB

Unlimited SSD Disk Space

Unlimited SSD Disk Space

Bandwidth

100 GB

Unlimited

Free Domain

No

1

1

Subdomains

1

Unlimited

Unlimited

Backups

Weekly

Weekly

Daily

Websites

1

Unlimited

Unlimited

Free SSL

No

No

No

Unlimited Domain Parking

No

Yes

Yes

30 days guarantee

Yes

Yes

Yes

6. Security Options (No Automatic Free SSL, Except On Highest Tier)

Ok, you
can install a free SSL certificate on all Hostinger plans…but you have
to do it via SSH, which is something most casual users won’t be able to
figure out.

Given that it’s 2018 and tons of other cheap shared WordPress hosts offer one-click free SSL certificates via their dashboards, we would love to see Hostinger add this feature.

Note – the top-tier Shared Business Hosting plan does get a free SSL – we’d just like to see this available on all plans.

7. Easy To Install WordPress (Or Other Software)

Like
traditional cPanel hosts, Hostinger includes an autoinstaller tool to
help you install WordPress (or Joomla, Drupal, etc.) in just a few
clicks.

We didn’t test every single autoinstaller, but the
WordPress autoinstaller is quite streamlined and feels more intuitive
than something like Softaculous that you’d get with other cPanel hosts:

8. Custom Hosting Dashboard That’s Easy To Use

Once you sign up for web hosting, Hostinger’s cPanel is where you’ll spend most of your time managing your site.

Hostinger’s
custom dashboard has a lot of similarities to the traditional cPanel
that most shared hosts use, but we actually found it be more streamlined
in areas that count.

For
example, when you add a new email account, you can see your POP3/SMTP
details right there, rather than having to click through to multiple
windows like traditional cPanel forces you to do.

Similarly, it’s simpler to do things like:

Create a new MySQL database and user

Configure redirects

Manage DNS Zones

Etc.

If
you’re already familiar with cPanel, you should feel right at home.
You’ll just have an easier time of performing certain actions!

Free Website Builder Tool

Beyond the array of auto-installers, Hostinger also offers a free Website Builder that lets you build a website using simple drag-and-drop. Our personal preference would be to probably use a WordPress page builder instead, but this free website builder is really convenient for first-time users who just want to get up and running with a simple page right away.

Synopsis: Hostinger Advantages

While
Hostinger is most known for its extremely affordable shared hosting, it
also comes with various other hosting services such as VPS hosting,
business hosting, cheap domains, and more. Hostinger is not the most
popular hosting company but it holds its own against BlueHost, A2
Hosting, and others.

Hostinger is perfect for beginners thanks to
its incredible price offers and great performance. You do not have to
pay extravagant yearly fees for good hosting. To learn more about
Hostinger’s features check out the list below.

Hostinger’s advantages are:

Affordable and discounted prices. With our discount coupon you can get an incredible discount for any of the three shared plans.

FREE domain. This option is available for its premium and business plans.

Free and easy site builder. You get a drag and drop website builder to help you create websites faster.

Intuitive Access Manager.

Deluxe Live Support. Access to talk to trained and knowledgeable customer support representatives.

30 days money back guarantee. A risk free way to check out Hostinger without committing.

Unlimited bandwidth. Premium and business plans get unlimited bandwidth while Single plans get 100 GB.

Free SSL certificate included. This option is available only for Business plan users.

Automatic weekly and daily back-ups. Hostinger offers its users the possibility for weekly or daily backup depending on their plan.

You can have unlimited websites. Add as many websites domains as you need.

Additional Info About Hostinger

Hostinger was first
launched in 2004 under the name Hosting Media. Once they launched their
free web hosting service at 000webhost.com and reached 1 million user
they also changed their name to Hostinger which remained to this day.

Thanks to their affordable and competitive price offers for
shared hosting and their free web hosting service they grew steadily in
popularity and reached over 29 million users. They started out with a
handful of people and now have offices in over 39 countries all over the
world. Hostinger’s Headquarters is in Kaunas, Lithuania being run by
its CEO, Arnas Stuopelis.

Apart from 000Webhost they have 3 more subsidiaries:
Hosting24 – which was launched in 2011 and is web hosting service mainly
for USA based clients, Niagahoster – an Indonesian web hosting service
launched in 2013, and their latest one launched in 2014, Weblink –
Brazil web hosting service.

Conclusion: Should You Choose Hostinger ?

Now for the million dollar question…

Should you use Hostinger?

If you look at Hostinger for what it is – affordable shared hosting – you’ll be happy.

It
manages to pack solid performance, a great custom dashboard, and other
helpful tools into a price that’s about as low as you’ll find in the web
hosting industry.

That makes it an amazing option for casual
webmasters, low-traffic sites, or anyone else who is just looking to get
something online without breaking the bank.

If that’s you – then
Hostinger will be a great option. And again, you get a 30-day money-back
guarantee, so you’re not risking anything by giving it a try.

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